Kamikaze Lust Read online

  I stared out the window, thinking how he’d strut into that club as if he were the headlining act, even after we discovered the crowd was younger and more lesbian-heavy than I would have thought of a drag show. “The girls love Tricky,” George explained. “Put him in a dress and he thinks he’s a glamour dyke.”

  “Then why does he keep talking about his I.U.D.?” I asked. “Dress or no dress, he doesn’t need an I.U.D.”

  Jason smiled at me. “Your thinking is too literal, Rachel. Gender is a more fluid thing, what do you think the internet is all about?”

  George and Jason danced. RR surveyed the crowd, the way I’d seen him watch over the set, making sure he got his money’s worth. So even-keeled was he as we moved from place to place, his bodyguard pose. I found it unnerving, particularly because I couldn’t stop staring at the women dancing. I used to go to the Columbia dances with Jason and watch women dance together, but then I’d been detached, or at least believed myself to be. Now, I could barely keep up my sophisticated ennui when what I really wanted was to bump and grind with Shade on the dance floor, heated by the stream of the strobes, the flinging of bodies, and the thump-thump soundtrack that vibrated my feet and tingled my spine. A fluid thing, yes, but I was unsure of my motives, being with one and wanting the other.

  It was an effort not to think of Shade, even with the strong, silent Republican sitting next to me, stretching his arm out behind him as if the cab were his coach. I leaned my head back into the seat, ran a quick loop through my mind: He cups his hand around the back of Silver Ray’s head and pushes it down to his lap. She feels around, unbuttons his jeans, and there they are, her and that intimidating prick, up close and personal in the stuffy heat, the smell of animal hide.

  I cracked the window. “Good idea,” he smiled and I smiled and we must have looked like a couple of idiots; two yellow smiley faces in the back of a yellow cab. He was making me nervous, and when I got nervous I started feeling ethnic. Our cab had become a pumpkin, Silver Ray and her platform slippers had vanished, leaving me at war with my Eastern-European thighs, my Hymietown hair. Nothing like I’d been earlier, dancing with Jason, who kept saying how impressed he was with me. Such chutzpa, dating a porn star. The self-esteem it must require, not to mention the stamina. “You have no idea,” I said, giving myself rare license to provoke. “I’m becoming an equal opportunity employer, too.”

  “Girls?” he said, and I darted my eyes around the room full of women, flaunting my ambivalence as if it were a diamond bracelet and not the usual cuffs around my wrists. I’d worked my HGQ, although I could feel it diminishing steadily since this silent cab ride began.

  We pulled up in front of my apartment. “Thanks for coming,” I said.

  “No problem.” He nodded, but made no move to kiss me or touch me or shake my hand even. Dejected, I clicked the handle, pushed the door with my foot, and climbed out. I didn’t want to kiss him, anyway; I liked women.

  “Listen,” he said. “Do you want to go to Vegas tomorrow?”

  “Are you serious?” I said, a bit shell-shocked. He couldn’t kiss me goodnight, but he wanted to take me on vacation the next day.

  “You still don’t believe me.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry, but no, I don’t want to go to Las Vegas.”

  “Have you ever been?”

  “No.” I knew only what I’d seen in the movies: flashing lights and the green baize of gaming tables, sequined tights and tuxedos, call girls and comedians on the glitter circuit. I also knew it was where Neil lived, and that I would therefore avoid it.

  “Well, you really should go,” he said.

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Just not tomorrow.”

  “No, not tomorrow.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “What is it with you and Las Vegas?”

  “It’s where I live.”

  Such simplicity again from the porno man—Rob Vaughn, with his conservative politics and cryptic smile. Where he lives. Sure, RR, whatever. I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth. “Well, viva Las Vegas to you then.”

  He laughed, and I liked the way his lips parted. Okay, maybe kissing him wouldn’t be so bad, but no way was I making the first move. He would at least have to get out of the cab. I leaned my arm against the door, giving him one final opportunity to jump out or call me back. He didn’t move. I sighed, “All right, I’m going in now.”

  He nodded. “See you around, Silver.”

  “Goodnight Mister…RR.”

  I slammed the door behind me, trudged up to my apartment where I kicked off my boots, slid out of my gown, and crawled into bed. There was something pathetic about lying naked in bed, alone. The wishful thinking and fantasies took over. If only I’d been more aggressive about him coming up. It wasn’t Vegas, but I did have a couple of Elvis CDs to guide us through the land of make-believe. Yet, given my fantasy of choice, I would rather put on Chet Baker singing “My Funny Valentine,” wound with the repeat button, the way I liked to listen to music: one song over and over again until I knew every word and breath and nuance. And Shade would be here with me, her body on mine, and…I felt sappy and weak. Lonely, too, planning the soundtrack for a scene that existed only in my mind. I turned on the TV: channel-surfed. The clock flashed three and I wanted to talk to Shade. A few minutes I wrestled the should-I-or-shouldn’t-I concerns of late-night callers—number one being convinced that she had another lover with her—before taking my chances.

  She picked up on the fourth ring, just as her machine was about to click on. “This better be good, Slivowitz,” she said.

  “I hate your caller ID.”

  “I have to be at the airport in a few hours.”

  “I’m sorry, I just wanted to talk.”

  “So talk,” she sighed, and I told her about my evening, feeling particularly self-righteous since nothing had happened between me and the porn star, and we’d actually ended up at a drag show with a bunch of lesbians. Shade laughed, but wouldn’t stop calling RR my boyfriend, choking on the word as if it were an aspirin tablet.

  A brief lull in conversation found me staring at the half-lit walls. Beneath the covers, the fingers of my left hand tickled my stomach.

  “What are you doing, anyway?” Shade said.

  “What am I doing?

  “Like, are you on the futon? In your PJs with a jar of Skippy?”

  “Actually I’m in bed with the TV on. No sound, though.”

  Shade asked me if I was watching a porn film. I said no, then asked: “Should I be?”

  “Sure.”

  I reached for the remote. X-posure already in the VCR, I fast-forwarded, giving Shade an overview of the plot, superfluous information about the characters and a few historical bits and pieces I’d picked up from Alexis. I slowed the tape at my favorite scene, the girl-girl action I’d practically committed to memory. “You want me to tell you what’s happening?”

  Shade laughed, said yes. “Well, Claire Blue has dark hair, blue eyes, and very red lips. Her neck is long, with thick jugular veins—”

  “Please, Slivowitz! Not a coroner’s report.”

  I felt my neck heat up. “Okay, her lover is taking her tongue and running it up the middle of her stomach, past her breasts…she’s whispering something in her ear and they both look…I don’t know.”

  “Horny?”

  “Yes, that’s a good word,” I said, and prompted by Shade’s questions, described the look in Claire Blue’s eyes. I was overheating; my comforter felt like the full-body bib the dentist covers you with before an x-ray. I kicked it off and lay naked, my body shining like an x-ray star: Silver Ray in X-posure sweet-talking the sexy Shade, whose name was all the introduction she needed, honey. I was made for this business.

  On screen, the action heated up. “She’s back downtown again,” I said, “with her tongue on her thigh and both her thumbs in her…I can’t, I can’t say it.”

  “Come on, it’s easy. Just say it: cunt.” The word sen
t shivers down my spine.

  I laughed nervously. “Cunt.”

  “Very good.”

  “Are we having phone sex?”

  “I think so, is that a problem?”

  “No.”

  “Then go on, I’m all ears. And fingers.”

  “Are you…?”

  “Uh-huh. Are you?”

  “Not yet.” I switched the phone to my left ear. I am a righty. “Okay, there we go, now where were we?”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Oh, remember, she’s got her thumbs in her…you know.”

  “Her cunt, you can do it,” Shade said.

  “I can’t, I feel stupid.”

  “Don’t,” Shade said. The rasp in her voice warmed my limbs. “You know how much I want you.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  She sighed. “…umn, what can I say? It’s been like forever. Remember the first day of the strike? I put the green M&M on your tongue, and I don’t know, I just wanted to leave my finger there, and I hadn’t felt that way in a while, at least not here in New York, and…oh…”

  “No, please, don’t stop,” I whispered, and moved my middle finger on top of my clit.

  “I’m…I’m getting all hot here for the record, but anyway, I don’t know, when you kissed me…you know those kisses you feel in your chest? And you kissed me, I always thought I would be the one…and frankly, it scared the shit out of me, but since then it’s all I think about. Baby, I want you. So much.”

  “I want you too.” I fingered myself as if I were standing alone in front of the mirror, thinking: baby, baby, baby. No one had ever called me baby. A word straight out of the generic supermarket, it always sounded so patronizing in those rock-and-roll anthems by men, but coming from Shade’s mouth got me all liquid. I had her repeat it a few times, then she followed with a play-by-play of what she would have done had she seen me in my black dress earlier. Her language was so crude and wonderful, a wire-tapper would have thought she was the one who’d been watching all the porno tapes. I would from that moment live to hear her say the word cunt in my ear, as she told me to add a finger and another until I was buried up to my knuckles and my wrist cramped. I knocked my head against the on-off button, accidentally hanging up the phone.

  “Shit!” I pushed the button, got a dial tone. My call waiting beeped.

  “You could give a girl a complex,” Shade said.

  “I needed both hands.”

  “Use something, go get a cucumber.”

  “Don’t have one.”

  “A carrot.”

  “I don’t eat vegetables.”

  “You really should, you’re not getting any younger. How about a candle?”

  “Too dangerous.” I reminded her of the blaze of my Chanukah candles the night I’d kissed her and the three hundred dollars the vet later charged for the kitty colonics to flush the wax from Freddy’s system.

  “I guess you need my penis then,” she said so seductively I was embarrassed by the image of her standing over me with a large strap-on and me, the big, fat bottom, craving her cock, begging for it. A flash of Tricky deep-throating his mike came to me. He’d said something like, “Fuck my pussy, you dyke bitch,” and I thought it strange at the time, and even stranger now, finger deep in this gender fluidity business.

  I lost myself in her words by the frosty glint of my TV screen. Closing my eyes, I stroked myself to the sound of her voice. I opened them, and there, as if set off in flashing lights, rested on my night table the toy pop-gun Mom had given me, its oblong shape and handle teasing.

  I inched forward and quietly grabbed the gun, cocking the cork in place, sliding the handle into the body, slowly, so it wouldn’t release. I slipped it in with a piercing jab, then the smooth swallow of my cunt and the feeling that the gun wasn’t big enough, that nothing would ever be big enough. I moaned and said something like please.

  “Oh yes, baby,” Shade said. “Yes.”

  And those were the last sentences we spoke for a while, the static of our connection usurped by a moan & groan track to match anything in X-posure, with Shade throwing in the occasional, oh baby, yes baby…and I knew I was going to come as if it were the easiest thing in the world, as if it were the only thing in the world, and I didn’t even care that her ear was so close to my voice when I did.

  Our heaving subsided into laughter then silence, the peaks and valleys of social realignment. Finally, Shade said she had to go, it was almost time to catch her plane.

  “Will you call me from home?”

  “Sure,” she said, and I saw myself waiting by the phone in the cold nights ahead. I would have to get a wall calendar and cross out the days until she returned. Or maybe I should just run a razor blade through my wrists and avoid the whole thing.

  A few minutes later we hung up, both of us afraid to let go first. I pulled out the gun and it hurt, a piercing like loneliness. The gun moist in my palm, I read the word: Bermuda. My mother and her boyfriend went to Bermuda and all they got me was this lousy sex toy.

  I pulled back the handle and popped it, shooting a few drops of fluid with the cork. My close up, my come shot, then the fading to black.

  PORN QUEEN FOR A DAY

  After Shade left, I started taking long walks through Central Park, with big sunglasses and a scarf wrapped tightly around my head. I’d gone totally Jackie O, afraid even strangers might see the fire in me, the blush from my pop-gun that sent me out into the winter-wet air conjuring in my mind images of hiking boots, snow flurries at football games, and commercials for cold medicine. Today, I felt the perfect pitch of blue, like the weather. Or PMS.

  I needed a hot dog with blood-orange onions. Never mind that I’d inhaled half a chocolate cake before leaving my apartment, I was hungry. These days my appetite was voracious, insatiable, fill in the adjectives. A hedonist’s delight to fit my video box. Let’s try ravenous: Nothing was ever enough, at night she cried out for more…Silver Ray is “Ravenous! ”

  So I kibitzed with my inner porn star as we hiked the urban tundra over to a hot dog stand. A man stood in front of me blowing smoke into his bare hands as the vendor ladled his hot dog with mustard and ketchup. It was short, the dog; probably less than six inches. At home, I’d been measuring objects with a wooden ruler, and then holding them against my stomach to see how high they’d get up inside of me. I needed some idea where twelve inches might land. A workable equation. The carrots, celery stalks, squashes, and cucumbers I’d purchased but had yet to eat all fell between six and nine inches. Bananas were about the same. The handle of my brush was five inches, the hammer ten, TV remote five, toothbrush holder six, cardboard kaleidoscope five and a half, pop-gun eight if you measured from the coconuts on the handle.

  The man in front of me paid the vendor, and I ordered my little dog. Turns out, six inches was nothing, eight completely manageable, but only if it was as thin as my pop-gun. The other day I wrapped a condom around a nine-inch cucumber, but even greased couldn’t get anywhere with it. Holding it against the toy gun I realized the vegetable was about three times as thick. Circumference was key. Pi times radius squared = R squared = RR = too big.

  I ate my hotdog so fast the roof of my mouth was raw, then made my way to the skating rink to watch the ruddy faces go round and round, taking comfort in the other bodies braving this cold fish of a day. I stayed until I couldn’t feel my toes.

  At the Seventy-second Street exit, I came upon Santa Claus ringing his bell over a Salvation Army bucket. I smiled.

  He said, “Merry Christmas, baby,” which I ignored. Nobody but Shade could get away with calling me that. “Are you on a soap opera?” he said even louder this time, and though I was tempted to say I was a porn star, I kept walking. “Bitch!” he blurted.

  I turned around. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me,” he said, his yellow-white beard attached crookedly to his lips, his muddy brown eyes full of blank rage. Something about his face reminded me of Kaminsky.

 
“How can you say that? You don’t even know me.”

  “I know your type.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “I know enough, you’re a—”

  “Don’t you dare!” I screamed, alarmed by the menacing beat of my heart. A few people had gathered around us, apparently to see who had the temerity to raise her voice at Santa Claus. Naughty, not nice; I had to calm down. I leaned back a few steps and turned away.

  “See, that’s it,” he taunted, shook his bell. “The way you move your head.”

  “What?”

  “You know what.”

  “Look, do you have a permit or something? I’ll call your supervisor.” The knot of my silk scarf gripped my neck. This made me angrier at Santa Claus. He said something I didn’t hear, then laughed so hard his cheap beard shook. Everyone around joined the playground choir. My chest cavity vibrated madly. Before I knew what was happening, I saw both of my palms stretch out in front of me and push against the pillow in his chest. He tripped backwards, and I kept pounding my fists against him, hoping to knock him over and shut him up. A thick arm grabbed me from behind. “Hey, settle down!”

  I swung around and came face-to-face with the strong arm of the NYPD, the man’s uniform as ridiculously blue as Santa’s was red. I sniffled once or twice, wiped a tear from my eye, afraid that I’d flipped. The cop screamed away the crowd and led us toward Santa’s unmanned coin bucket.

  Had someone described this scene to me, I would not have recognized myself. Normally, I walked away from arguments, avoided scenes, and always backed down from physical contact. Whenever my parents started fighting I was the first to sprint from the room, and I spent too many hours hiding from my brothers. Once, when I was about ten, I did try to kick Neil, but like a masked goalie he caught my foot, and I fell flat on my ass. For weeks my walk was unbalanced and he called me a gimp.

  That pain in my ass returned as I shrank further inside my skin. Santa brushed a few twigs from his suit and said, “She’s fucking crazy, she hit me.”